Hoping for Better, 3 Years Since Oct. 7

His majestic body, that I carried in my body many moons ago, was returned to me in a bag, skeletal, bearing signs of torture, filthy, missing his left forearm that had been blown off during his abduction, and with six bullet wounds. I awake every day to the confusion of this truth. I am glued to time’s flypaper of stickiness. I cannot move.

People care about us and want my family and me to improve—emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, and otherwise. They desperately want us to get… better. I am told this is similar to the way people who lost loved ones on 9/11 encounter well-meaning comforters, in the quarter century since they lost someone core to their identity, in this layered and puzzling place called life.

I remember waking up on Sept. 11, 2001, in our house in Berkeley, California. My husband Jon was already in the shower. It was around 6:30 in the morning, and I could hear baby Hersh, just 11 months old, cooing in his crib in the room adjacent to mine. The clock radio (remember those?) was on. In my fuzzy moments of waking, I shot up in bed when I heard the announcer say something about an airplane flying into the World Trade Center in New York.